Category Archives: News

Old Jolty has been sent off to Apple for review; with a little luck it’ll be in the store in four or so days, though it could be almost two weeks.

In the meantime I thought I’d ramble a little about a curious game idea I’ve had. Though I’m really not sure to the legality of it so do chip in if you have an opinion.

Basically the idea revolves around taking an old B-Movie, which is currently in the public domain, for example Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, and essentially turning it into an extremely cheesy FMV adventure game. So a comedy adventure game spaced between film footage, playing on the so bad it’s good angle of both old B-Movies and FMV games.

A scene from Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet.

It could be an iPad game, though it might be quite costly in hard drive space if it contains a lot of film footage. But I imagine with enough compression and editing that could be worked around. However I’m still not 100% certain on the legality, though films in the public domain supposedly have no copyright I’m sure there could be other compromising factors. For instance Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet is a re-edited/ plagiarized version of the Russian movie “Planet of Storms”, which might not be in the public domain.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw that out there. I have something completely different planned for my next game, which I’ll share in due time after I’m done checking its viable and have some pretty screenshots.

The Den, base of operations for Lunacy’s werewolves. A little off topic I know but I didn’t want to let Hedjeroo’s lovely artwork lie unappreciated on my hard drive for months. It's intended to serve as a between game sessions menu, with buttons spray painted on the wall.

Sadly I must announce that I’m putting Lunacy on hold. It wasn’t the easiest decision but I’m confident I’m making the right choice.

There was only me and Hedjeroo left contributing to the project and yesterday I sat down and attempted to estimate just how much more time it would take to complete. I came to the conclusion that with Hedjeroo continuing to contribute 2d artwork whilst I continue to handle everything else it was going to take at least another eleven weeks. Which is really just too long for me to keep soldiering on given my current circumstances.

I imagine it’s a fairly common mistake for new devs to try something too ambitious with their first proper game. I could compensate at this point and try to “cut the fat off the game”. But honestly I don’t think I can do that without making it a radically different game. One that wouldn’t really do credit to the embarrassing amount of time poured into it.

Instead I’ve decided to take everything I’ve learnt from Lunacy and challenge myself to create a completely different, much simpler iOS game in just one month, (As part of onegameamonth!) It’ll be just me on this new project and I’ll be posting some information on the new game here either tomorrow or the day after.

I have every intention of returning to Lunacy at some point, but regardless I’d like to thank everyone who contributed, gave feedback or support for it. It’ll be back one day!

Ivorie’s character portrait, her werewolf form is based on a white wolf

Even more Optimised: As boring as it is to say, Lunacy has undergone yet more optimization! Everybody’s favorite element of games development.

Music: Andrews’ awesome music is in game, now if only I could figure out how to squeeze it into the next Dev Vid without me having to stop speaking for ages.

Searchable Buildings: Buildings can now be searched for supplies, there’s some definite survival game flavour sneaking into this action game.

Close Quarters Weaponry: Melee/Close Combat weapons are in and working! To be specific a particularly nasty looking baseball bat filled with nails.

Lighting Overhaul: Lunacy is now lit by a mix of vertex lighting, baked light maps and my sweat and tears. In layman’s terms, it’s prettier!

+1 to Scenery: Cars, ambulances, new lampposts, porch lights, new hedges and some suspiciously Cretaceous footprints have been added.

+1 to Ergonomics: On screen joysticks are larger, more sensitive and aligned with the camera in a more constructive manner.

Camera Upgrade: The camera is now angled in a more interesting way, and automatically adjusts itself should buildings block your view.

Smoother Zombies: Zombies now animate and turn more smoothly.

Moar Zombies: The zombies in the suburbs have diversified into Classics, Runners, Sprinters and Crunchy Ones and been color coded for your convenience. I imagine I’ll do a post about the differences between these guys sometime soon.

Only the werewolf transformation and survivor tracking mechanics need to be done now. Then all the core bits that make up a game session are complete and focus can move in the direction of menus, journals, leveling up etc.

Things are starting to come together now, here’s an update on what’s happened since I last posted:

The game has undergone a mass of optimization and bug fixing.

After some bickering with it I’ve managed to convince the iPhone 4 to let us use areas/levels arguably far larger then any mobile game should reasonably employ.

Zombies now scatter supplies (in the form of tinned food), health packs and ammo packs on death.

A rough version of the suburbs (Lunacy’s first area) is now in game and working.

We’ve now got the zombies spawning off camera in little groups in a fairly intelligent manner.

All the code for searching buildings is written out and awaiting implementation.

Andrew (Shelton) has very nearly finished making us some frankly quite awesome background music.

With that out of the way, I’m once again going to have a little ramble about elements of the game itself, this time how I intend to approach its narrative.

Now I’m a storyteller at heart, I DM pen and paper roleplaying games, have written pages upon pages of lore for mod projects and, god willing, will publish my own roleplaying system and world one day. So naturally I’ve always wanted to give Lunacy some form of cohesive narrative other then just “You’re traveling from A to B to C killing zombies and other exotic things as you go.”

However, Lunacy is a mobile game, designed to be played in short fast paced sessions. Filling up this limited playtime with dialogue or narration would force the play sessions to be longer, increasing the chance the player will need to put their phone down and do something else before the end of the session.

Furthermore Lunacy is also primarily an action game and interrupting the pace of gameplay in the middle of a session to force dialogue or narration onto the player could annoy a large part of the games potential audience; who likely isn’t interested in slowly unraveling the sinister truth behind why the dead are walking or their characters thoughts about the situation. Rather they just want to have fun fighting some zombies as a werewolf for a little while.

Because of these factors I’ve resorted to what I think is an un-intrusive method of storytelling, one that essentially renders the thick of the games story optional. In each of the games area’s the player has a large amount of objectives to complete in order to unlock the next area. I intend to have the player’s character reflect on their experiences in short, tweet-sized journal entries every time the player completes an objective. All these remarks will then be available in the character’s journal outside of game sessions (and not be forced upon the player in any way), coming together to tell the story of what each character perceives to be going on in Luna City.

Meanwhile anyone not reading the journals will still have a vague narrative akin to many existing mobile action games simply because of their progress through the objectives and the gameplay itself. On a related note I intend to give every element of the game some kind of grounding in the setting as to not break immersion, thusly even the freemium elements we intend to include will make narrative sense within the setting.

And there you have it, I have plenty more to talk about but I think that was definitely enough of a wall of text by itself. Next post I’ll venture into the questionable sanity and reasoning behind why there’s going to be a Vampire T-Rex in the game… yes, you read that right.

Not much to report in the way of changes to the development build, the only obvious change since GameDevMidlands is that reloading now takes 2 seconds and is visualized via an animated icon above the protagonist’s head.

However outside of the dev build there’s been quite a lot going on. Andrew Shelton has joined the fray and is working on some sweet sounding background music for us. Likewise Richard Haddon of Arctic Furnace is now contributing 3D models to the project. So much prettier screenshots are on the way!

Progress update aside I’m trying to write a little about the intended gameplay in each of these updates from now on, this time I’m going to touch on Lunacy’s RPG/progression elements.

In lunacy your werewolf gets more powerful as you increase their level and get them better weapons. As you can probably guess you get levels via Xp, which you get by killing zombies. However you also get a small amount of Xp for searching buildings. Each building search consists of your werewolf briefly entering and exiting the building, you don’t have to navigate around the inside in any way.

Weapons are a bit different though, to get them you have to trade supplies (the games main currency) with survivors you have previously rescued, who will then go out and find the desired weapons for you. You find supplies by searching buildings as well as getting a tiny amount through; you guessed it, killing zombies. However finding survivors is a little more complicated and involves tracking them down by their scent during gameplay. More powerful weapons can only be attained with more allied survivors, and each area only contains a limited number of survivors in need of rescue, so if you want to play with the big guns you’re going to need to explore more and more deadly areas.

Meanwhile leveling in lunacy is pretty simple; your werewolf has four attributes as described below:

As you can probably guess, after gaining a level you’re given a number a points to distribute between these attributes as you see fit. However each character starts with significantly more points in a single attribute. Colt has more endurance, Lupa more speed, Griogair more strength and Ivorie more precision.

And that’s how the games core progression is intended to work at the moment. As always any feedback and/or comments are welcome.

We’ve settled on developing Lunacy for iPhone 4 and higher only, allowing us to take advantage of higher resolution displays. Sadly it simply makes more sense for our first game then throwing more time and money at trying to support anything older.

Since my last post I have mastered the awesome power of Blender, along with the new Unity Mecanim Animation system (Which is great btw) and can report the following progress:

Colt is in game and functioning.

The animations for protagonists moving about with and without duel ranged weapon sets have been implemented. Adding in any other ranged weapon from here on is easy. Likewise adding other protagonists would be easy from here on, if they weren’t more time intensive to model.

I’ve jazzed up the gun firing FX.

We’re aiming to have all our placeholders replaced with functioning game assets soon and have the games first proper build with us at GameDevNorth later this month. I’ll also endeavor to post updates here more frequently from now on.

And now, a random artdump; It’s 3D Colt next to 2D Colt. (We’re going with pretty minimalistic 3d graphics on this to leave plenty of processing power for zombie hordes.)

I hope everyone enjoyed Christmas; December brought with it some interesting progress for us. Here’s the gist of it:

• The development build is now running smoothly on an iphone 4, we’re still trying to muster up iphone 3 support.

• The game’s 3rd person control scheme has been implemented. Complete with independent facing and moving directions, along with movement speeds which vary based on the correlation of said directions.

• Zombie’s now have functional pathing and will make their way round obstacles to feast on the protagonist’s delicious delicious brains.

• The protagonist can now kill zombies via ranged attack and the zombies will happily return the favour if they’re allowed to get close enough.

• Hedjeroo has pretty much finished digitally painting each of the protagonists’ full portraits in glorious colour. I’m resisting the urge to put these up and show them off for now.

We’ll now be directing our efforts to the core art assets of the game. Hedjeroo will be turning her attention to the games UI whilst I work on the character models+animations and Andy focuses on the props+level design.

Both myself and Andy are fairly new to blender having been trained in 3ds Max so if anyone out there has any tips on easing the transition they’d be more than welcome.

I’m going to hold back on any screenshots or pictures of the game until we’ve got our core assets in, (Our placeholders really don’t make for a pretty sight).

Sadly it’s looking like we’ll have to push back our release date but things are speeding up now so we’ll see.

It took longer than I expected but the new site is finally ready, and will remain in this format for at least as long as it takes to complete and publish Lunacy, our first game. Myself and Andy will be attending LAUNCH: Future Gaming & Digital Conference 2012 next week after which the site will play host to regular progress updates, in the meantime I’ve included a little description of Lunacy on our games page.